Draw Naked
The following questions came from Kristen Radtke in preparation for Draw Naked, her BuzzFeed feature on Female Cartoonists Drawing Their Bodies. With 23 women involved there was only room for a brief quote from each creator, but after publishing my piece on sexuality in autobio comics…
(A) Lucy’s on fire today and you should click through to read the whole thing.
(B) I want to specifically point out this bit, because it’s another moment of “I know some really fucking amazing people who’re doing not only good work that’s enjoyable, but also good work that’s important”:
“I could wax poetic for days about how important I think Erika’s work has been for a new generation of webcomics readers who are finding ways to normalize and embrace sexuality through reading her comics, and I was really honored to be a part of that.”
Is it humblebragging to be all “I KNOW HER”? If so, I’m humblebragging, but in a genuine humble way because I agree with Lucy, I think Erika’s really important and influential in terms of webcomics and inspiring future creators in a way that I don’t think we’ll realize for awhile yet.
So, yeah: awesome people here in Portland. Just saying.
“Sexy Lucy”
“So, I have a challenge for you.”
I’m sitting on the couch scarfing pomegranate seeds and ice cream while my gentleman friend looks up from doing the crossword.
“I’d love to see you draw Sexy Lucy. I mean, if you want to. If you think it would be fun.”
I laugh through a mouthful of dessert. “What? Why?”
“Well, I saw you draw Happy Lucy today and that was really adorable, and I’ve seen Grumpy Lucy and Goofy Lucy and Tired Lucy, but you never seem to draw Sexy Lucy.”
Now, my gentleman friend is a smart cookie. He is perceptive and thoughtful and often gets me thinking about things I’ve become comfortable accepting at face value. I like him for this and many other reasons.
“That’s not…” I frown, trying to word my response properly.
He raises his hands “I mean, I get it. Cartoon Lucy is boats and comics and illustration, right?”
“Yeah but that’s not the whole of it. Cartoon Lucy is mostly cute and euphoric and goofy. She’s kind of a muppet. These are not characteristics that are divorced from who I actually am. They’re very accurate portrayals ofparts of me. But there’s also stuff I leave out. Stuff a lot of autobio cartoonists leave out.”
We go on to talk about it for a little while, but even after the conversation moves on to something else this question sticks with me. Why is it that all the autobio cartoonists I know (even the immensely sex-positive ones who spend the rest of their time drawing porn or sex toy reviews or even stories about making out with their younger selves) seem to avoid drawing themselvesas sex symbols? When we talk about sex or sexuality it’s either playful or sweet or educational or analytical or mortifying or just downright goofy, but rarely…sexy.
So very worth reading, and one of those moments when you read something and go that person’s a friend of mine and I am not worthy. Or, at least, you do if you’re me.
I’m kind of confused as to why Steve was angry at Tony in Avengers #34 and now he’s apparently on good terms with Tony as of Captain America #25 and Axis #1, which take place later on. Will this be explained eventually?
People seem to be very confused about the overall chronology, so I thought I should maybe lay some stuff out here, because there is one gaffe within it all that seems to be causing a lot of the problems. And that gaffe is Thor’s hammer.
So yes, going back, RAGNAROK NOW/AVENGE THE EARTH happens in UNCANNY AVENGERS. Thereafter. some time later, ORIGINAL SIN happens, during which Steve Rogers regains his knowledge of the Illuminati and what they’ve been doing.
The bit that people seem to be having difficulty with is the fact that Steve doesn’t act on this information immediately. But he does not—he doesn’t make a move until some point within the eight month period we’re now in, leading up to the TIME RUNS OUT issues of AVENGERS/NEW AVENGERS.
Part of that is that he’s dealing with other problems, primarily the loss of his youth and vigor, which happens in CAPTAIN AMERICA. This is where the Thor problem comes in, as because we were working on all of this stuff so far ahead of time, Thor appears in the immediate follow-up storyline in CAP, THE TOMORROW SOLDIER, with his hammer.
Given that Thor doesn’t do anything particularly important with his hammer in that storyline, just assume that that’s a “chronicler’s error”, and that he was actually wielding his axe, Jarnbjorn.
This all takes us into AXIS, where not only has Sam Wilson succeeded Steve as Captain America, but Wolverine has also died, in DEATH OF WOLVERINE. And Thor is again carrying Jarnbjorn.
And at some point over the next few months, we’ll get to the point where things begin to lay out as we see them in AVENGERS #35 and NEW AVENGERS #24 and thereafter. But we’re not quite there yet.
Also, as I mentioned earlier today, Thor having both arms in AXIS #1 isn’t a mistake. You’ll have to keep reading both AXIS and THOR to see what I mean—or you can not, and either simply take my word for it, or decide that I’m crazy and not buy any of it. Totally up to you. But Thor having both arms was an important bit of coordination between the AXIS crew and the THOR crew.
Simple enough, yes?
(And here come the questions…)
Comics, everybody!
One thing that struck as extra-odd was the idea that there’s hell to pay in terms of people holding grudges. I haven’t found this to be true over the life of what I shudder to call a career in comics. People get grumpy and pissy about stuff, but actually holding a lingering resentment? It doesn’t seem to happen because of critical discourse. The publishers of this site once conspired to label Adrian Tomine a moron and a piker; here’s him holding a grudge. I think I’ve interviewed all of the comics pros that went after me hard during that same era. Two of the comics professionals I like most currently are people with whom I’ve had massive differences of opinion in the critical realm. Many of the other people of whom I’m most fond in comics are very critical of my own work. I worked for King Features seven months after writing really negative articles about King Features.
Reading this, I had two immediate responses. The first was a cynical, “Clearly, Tom hasn’t criticized enough Big Two comic books/comic book creators*” and the second, a more wistful “Why can’t I be like Tom?”
I agree that there’s not “hell to pay” about people holding grudges, although I’ve certainly had experiences where people holding grudges against me have had problematic impacts on my life and my job in ways I wouldn’t have anticipated. But for the most part, what can you do about people holding grudges, especially if you’ve apologized and tried to rebuild bridges you didn’t even know existed before apparently burning them down? Some people are just resentful and petty and angry, and you have to just let them be like that, I guess.
(* That sounds like sarcasm, but it’s not; I genuinely think creators and staff working for those companies trend towards paranoia and grudges more easily than independent cartoonists for reasons that essentially come down to the corporate culture in which they have to operate and the Internet culture which has built itself up around those companies, but that might be my own personal experience forming an entirely unrealistic bias.)
So much of this series is tied up in hoping that I, as a reader, cares about the Watcher being killed, about whatever new retcons the writers have thought up, and about Nick Fury as the man on the wall. As stories, all of those can be great, but as concepts, they’re just ideas on the page that excite me as much as any random creator interview, which is not a lot. Watching as the characters run around over the paper-thin surface of this ‘story,’ they become increasingly less motivated by anything internal and just seem like cogs.
Chad Nevett on Marvel’s last event series, Original Sin. Well worth a read.
For starters, there’s no real explanation of what an Onslaught is. Is the Red Skull actually dead or transformed? Is Red Onslaught a separate entity and the dead Red Skull’s voice is still somehow around? Is the Red Skull in control of Onslaught? I have no idea. I guess if I’d read the Onslaught X-Men comics back in the mid-90s, I might know, but I dropped those like a brick before the lead-in to outsourcing the core books to Image happened. That wasn’t really covered here except a line about Onslaught being a construct of pure hate, which didn’t exactly enlighten me. Still, the character (characters?) has multiple voices which seem to be dominant at different times and it wasn’t exactly clear storytelling. The story reads like everyone is supposed to know what an Onslaught is. If the characters were confused, I might not feel like I’m missing out on something.
This made me feel very glad I decided not to try out Axis today after all. I’m burned out on Marvel events and the whole massive continuity clusterfuck of them all.